Out of the Dark Read online

  Evan wanders the neighborhood until he comes upon a GAZ Volga, a four-door sedan as common on these streets as a Chrysler in Detroit. He hot-wires it and leaves the city, driving into a bruise-colored sunset. He parks several blocks from the apartment with the curved stucco staircase and then closes the distance under cover of the rapidly falling night. Only once he’s reached the blue-and-white Turkish tiles does he remove his pick set. The rusting lock on the arched wooden door gives itself up within seconds.

  Evan steals silently across the dark front room with its vaulted ceiling. The Makarov pistol remains in its place, resting atop the antique television. It is loaded.

  In the rear of the apartment, the kitchen is lit, and carrying through the beaded curtain is the static-filled sound of an animated radio announcer rattling on in a language with which Evan is unfamiliar. Tajik? Bukhori?

  How little he knows of this life he is about to extinguish.

  The hanging beads slice his view into vertical slats. The man sits at the small chipped table, facing away, spooning soup from a bowl. An old-fashioned radio rests on the counter beside a hot plate. A prosaic little portrait: Man Eating Dinner Alone.

  Evan steps through the curtain, the clattering beads announcing his presence. The man turns and looks back through his wireless spectacles. There is a moment of recognition, and then the lines of his face contract in sorrow. There is no anger or fear—only sadness. He nods once and turns slowly back to his soup.

  Evan shoots him through the back of the head.

  As the man tilts forward, his chair slides back a few inches and his body remains resting there, chest to the table’s edge, face in the soup.

  Evan lifts him out of the soup, upright into the chair, and cleans his face as best he can. His left eye is gone, and part of his forehead. As Evan returns the dish towel to the counter, he comes upon a crude clay ashtray, shaped by a child’s hand.

  He vomits into the sink.

  After, he finds a bottle of bleach in a cabinet and sloshes it into the drain.

  As he exits onto the dark staircase, he becomes aware of a man easing up the stairs, drawn perhaps by the sound of the gunshot. The man’s left fist gleams even in the shadow.

  They freeze midway down the stairs.

  The man is all dark silhouette to Evan, just as Evan is to him. The man’s head dips, orienting on the pistol in Evan’s hand. The man lowers his own gun, opens his other palm in a show of harmlessness, and shakes his head. Evan nods and brushes past him.

  Ten minutes later, halfway back to the city, his knotted chest still prevents him from drawing full breaths.

  His next stop is the abandoned textile factory. As he enters, darting through the warren of giant fabric rolls, the trim Estonian appears suddenly. He holds a no-shit Kalashnikov, its curved magazine protruding like a tusk. Evan has brought a pistol to an AK-47 fight. They are standing by the industrial weaving loom where they met before.

  The Estonian cocks his head with benign curiosity, but his grip stays firm on the assault rifle, his small eyes hard like pebbles. Even at this hour, roused from sleep, he wears neatly pressed trousers and a tailored shirt, though one flap remains untucked. The door to the office behind him is closed, but a smudged glow illuminates the fogged glass of the window.

  The men square off in an uneasy truce, not aiming their weapons but not putting them away either.

  “I need your help,” Evan says. Slowly, cautiously, he raises the Makarov, then fiddles with the slide. “It keeps jamming.”

  The Estonian’s smile appears, a neat arc sliced through soft pink cheeks. “That is because you did not buy it from me.” He reaches for the gun. “But seriously, this is a statistical near impossibility. Makarovs do not jam.”

  Evan knows this, but it was the only excuse he could fabricate in the moment.

  The Estonian shakes his hand impatiently. Beneath his other elbow, the muzzle of the AK nudges forward. “Well?”

  Evan is forced to relinquish the pistol.

  The Estonian takes it, then sets down his own weapon on the loom. He drops the magazine, examines it, then grins at Evan’s ignorance. “The underside of the magazine feed lip has a burr from grinding on the clearance.”

  With the toe of his loafer, he hooks a cardboard box and tugs it out from beneath the loom. Digging through the contents, he produces a new magazine, jams it home, and hands the pistol back to Evan.

  “I’m sorry,” Evan says, and shoots the man through the chest.

  The Estonian falls back, his palms slapping the concrete. He is trembling, his arms wobbling violently. A cough leaves a coat of fine spittle on his blue lips. His pupils track up in little jerks, find Evan. Never has Evan seen such terror in another person’s face.

  Evan crouches, takes his manicured hand. The nails are clean and cut short. The Estonian clutches Evan’s fingers, grips his forearm with his other hand, pulls him closer. The partial embrace in another context would be affectionate. Perhaps it is even now. Evan lowers him gently to the floor, cradling his head so it doesn’t strike the concrete. He holds the man’s hand until it goes limp.

  Then he rises, walks back to the humble office, and opens the door. The girl, bloody-lipped and ashen, lies balled up on the mattress. A heroin kit rests on a metal folding chair. She is naked, spotted with bruises, skin tented across bones. Her left shoulder looks dislocated. It is impossible that she would not have heard the gunshot.

  On a metal desk across from the mattress, a cigar box brims with bills. Evan picks it up, sets it on the floor by her thin arm. “You’re free to go now,” he says.

  She rolls her eyes languidly toward him. “Where?” she says.

  He leaves her there with the box full of cash.

  That night he beds down at a different hotel, logging in to e-mail and leaving a draft for Jack. “Operation closed.”

  He checks departure times out of the second-largest airport of the neighboring country. Tomorrow will be a busy day.

  And tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

  Now

  1

  Face in the Crowd

  A man melted into the throng of tourists gathered along the E Street walkway. He was neither tall nor short, muscle-bound nor skinny. Just an average guy, not too handsome.

  A Washington Nationals baseball cap was pulled low over his eyes to thwart the security cameras. He’d shoved rolls of dental cotton above his molars to alter his facial structure and thwart the biometrics software that the Secret Service ran on every face in the crowd. He wore fitted clothing that showed the contours of his body, no out-of-season overcoat that might conceal gear or weaponry and draw unwanted focus.

  He had flown to D.C. from the West Coast—as he had the time before and the time before that—under a passport in another name. He’d rented a car using a different identity and checked in to a hotel using a third.

  He slurped the Big Gulp he’d picked up at 7-Eleven, another prop to augment the T-shirt from the National Air and Space Museum and the Clarks walking shoes he’d bought last week and tumbled in the dryer with dirty rags so they’d look broken in. The soda tasted like what it was, sugar soaked in corn syrup, and he wondered why people willingly put this type of fuel through their system.

  He knew which visual triggers to avoid; he wasn’t sweating and was careful to make no nervous movements—no protective hunching of the shoulders or jittering from foot to foot. He didn’t carry a bag or a backpack and he kept his hands out of his pockets.

  Evan Smoak knew the Secret Service protocols well.

  He’d spent the past half year assembling intel piece by piece and tiling it into a larger mosaic. He was nearing the final stages of general reconnaissance. It was time to get down to mission planning.

  He set his hands on the bars of the eight-foot-high gates. The trees of the South Lawn formed a funnel leading to the White House, which would have been a fine metaphor for Evan’s own narrowed focus if he were the type to bother with metaphors.

 
Setting his Big Gulp on the pavement, he raised the camera dangling around his neck and pretended to fuss with it. In order to slip it between the bars of the fence, he had to remove the hood from the 18-200mm Nikkor lens. When he put his eye to the viewfinder, a zoomed-in image of the White House’s south side loomed unobstructed.

  Lost in a mob of tourists taking pictures, he let the lens pick across the grounds. The obstacles were impressive.

  Strategically positioned steel bollards dotted the perimeter.

  Subterranean beams waited to thrust up from the earth at the slightest provocation.

  Ten feet back from the fence line, ground sensors and high-res surveillance cameras lay in wait, ready to capture any flicker of movement or tremble of the earth on the wrong side of the bars.

  Uniformed Division officers stood at high-visibility posts at intervals across the terrain, backed by an emergency-response team equipped with FN P90 submachine guns. In keeping with Secret Service stereotypes, the agents wore Wiley X sunglasses, but the shades had a strategic advantage as well: A would-be assailant could never be sure precisely where they were looking. The high-visibility posts kept people in the crowd from seeing all the security measures they were supposed to miss.

  At the southwest gate, a pair of Belgian Malinois commanded a concrete apron that was thermoelectrically cooled so it wouldn’t burn their paws in the summer heat. They sniffed all incoming vehicles for explosives. They were also cross-trained to attack in the event a fence jumper made it over the spikes. If there were worse places to wind up than in the jaws of a seventy-five-pound Malinois, Evan wasn’t sure where they were. The dogs were bona fide assaulters, way above their weight class; SEAL Team Six had gone so far as to parachute into the Abbottabad compound with a specimen of the breed.

  Next Evan swiveled the camera to the White House itself. The semicircular portico of the south side, like the rest of the building’s exterior, was outfitted with infrared detectors and audio sensors, all of them monitored 24/7 by on-site nerve centers as well as by the Joint Operations Center in the Secret Service headquarters a mile to the east.

  Agents at the JOC additionally monitored radar screens that showed every plane entering the surrounding airspace. They maintained an around-the-clock interface with the Federal Aviation Administration and the control tower at Reagan National Airport. If a drone or a superhuman pilot managed to steer through the gauntlet of early warning mechanisms, an air defense system loaded with FIM-92 Stinger missiles was hard-mounted to the White House itself, standing by for dynamic air interception.

  Evan tilted the zoom lens up to the roof above the Truman Balcony. A designated marksman with a Stoner SR-16 rifle held a permanent position providing overwatch for the south lawn, where enormous red coasters marked the landing zone for Marine One, the presidential helicopter. Countersnipers patrolled the roof toting .300 Win Mags, good to fifteen hundred meters out, which created a protective dome stretching a mile in every direction.

  It wouldn’t merely be tough to reach the White House. It would be impossible.

  Not that it got easier if some lucky soul managed to get to the building’s threshold.

  Between metal detectors, guard stations, and magnetometer wands, nothing entered the White House that hadn’t been painstakingly screened. Not a single one of the million pieces of annual incoming mail. Not even the air itself. Electronic noses at all entrances detected the faintest signature of airborne pathogens, dangerous gases, or any other ill wind blowing no good. The Technical Security Division ran daily sweeps on every room, checking for weaponized viruses, bacteria, radioactivity, explosive residue, and contaminants of a more exotic stripe.

  Even if by a miracle someone was able to actually penetrate the most secure building on earth, the White House was equipped with further contingencies yet. The interior hid not just countless panic buttons, alarms, and safe rooms but also multiple emergency escape routes, including a ten-foot-wide tunnel that burrowed beneath East Executive Avenue NW into the basement of the Treasury Department across the street.

  Lowering the camera, Evan drew back from the reinforced steel bars and let out an undetectable sigh.

  Killing the president was going to be a lot of work.

  2

  An Absence of Light

  Orphan X.

  That was Evan’s designation, bestowed upon him at the age of twelve when he’d been yanked out of a foster home and brought up in a full-deniability program buried deep inside the Department of Defense. It wasn’t just a black program; it was full dark. You could stare right at it and comprehend nothing but an absence of light.

  About a decade ago, the inevitable ambiguities of the operations Evan was tasked with had reached a tipping point. So he’d fled the Orphan Program and blipped off the radar.

  He’d kept the vast resources he had accrued as a black operator and the skills embedded in his muscle memory. But he’d also kept the bearings of his moral compass that had, despite the blood he’d spilled across six continents, stubbornly refused to be shattered.

  Now he was the Nowhere Man, lending his services to the truly desperate, to people who had nowhere else to turn. He’d been content to leave the past in the past. Even within the intel community, the Program had remained largely unknown. Evan’s code name, Orphan X, was dismissed as a figure of myth or an urban legend. Few people knew who Evan was or what he’d done.

  Unfortunately, one of them happened to be the president of the United States.

  Jonathan Bennett had been the undersecretary of defense for policy at the Department of Defense during Evan’s incipient years in the Program. Through a trickle-down system designed to maximize plausible deniability, Bennett had given the mission orders. Evan had been the most effective operator on Bennett’s watch, killing enough declared enemies of the state to fill a graveyard. Evan knew where the bodies were buried; he’d put them in the ground.

  Years later, when Bennett had become president, he’d set about erasing any record of the constitutionally questionable program he’d overseen. Through sweat, blood, and hard work, Evan had discovered that Bennett was particularly obsessed with eradicating any trace of the 1997 mission.

  Which put Evan at the top of the hit list.

  He didn’t know why the mission held a special place in Bennett’s paranoiac heart or why that assassination in that distant gray city was relevant today. On that cold fatal morning, what mysteries had lingered outside the periphery of Evan’s scope? In pulling the trigger, had he toppled a domino, sparking a chain reaction with momentous consequences? Or in the dankness of that sewer, had he waded into something intimate, putting himself in the crosshairs of a personal vendetta? He didn’t have any answers.

  Only that Bennett wanted him eliminated.

  And that he, in turn, wanted to eliminate Bennett.

  But Evan’s motives weren’t merely self-protective. Bennett was morally corrupt in the most profound sense, a rot seeping down through the chain of command. From the highest office, he had ordered the deaths of a number of Orphans, executing those who, under his tenure, had risked their lives for their country. And he’d had someone else killed as well, a man so steadfast and true that Evan had come to view him as a father.

  That had been a miscalculation.

  Which was why Evan was here now, pressed against the White House gates with a gaggle of tourists in the sticky June heat, waiting for a sign of the Man.

  The woman to Evan’s side rose onto tiptoes, funneling her children before her to provide them a better view. “Look! I think that’s him! I think he’s coming!” She swatted her eldest on the arm. “Close out that Pokémon nonsense and take some pictures for your Instagram.”

  Evan lowered the camera and retrieved his Big Gulp as the phalanx of vehicles rolled into sight, tailing down the circular drive as they departed the West Wing. The motorcade was the so-called informal package, eight Secret Service G-rides and three indistinguishable presidential limos. The three limos forced potential assa
ssins to play a shell game when choosing a target; they never knew for sure which one the president was riding in. The decoys pulled double-duty as backup vehicles in the event of an attack.

  As the convoy neared the South Lawn, it halted abruptly.

  Excitement flickered in Evan’s chest, the lick of a cool flame. Was this the opportunity he’d been waiting on for 237 surveillance hours spread over the past six months?

  He lifted the camera again in time to see an aide jog out from the edge of the Rose Garden, a soft-sided leather briefcase in hand. The trees cut visibility, the aide flickering in and out of view as he neared the motorcade. To keep the aide in sight, Evan threaded through the crowd along the gate.

  The aide halted by the middle limousine, barely visible between the trees. The door popped open, just barely, and the aide slid the briefcase through the tiny gap.

  The door closed once more.

  The episode could have been witnessed by only a dozen people standing in the right vantage point along the gate.

  It was indeed the break Evan had waited half a year for.

  Bennett had shown his hand.

  But because the president was in the middle limo now, that didn’t mean he’d be in the middle limo next time. Or that the limos drove in the same order each time.

  Evan’s mind raced, grasping for variables.

  The president might not have a favorite presidential limousine. But he’d almost certainly have a favorite driver.

  Evan had to watch not the limos, but the drivers.

  Or more precisely—since the drivers were hidden behind tinted windows in identical vehicles—Evan had to watch how the drivers drove, identifying any distinctive feature of how the middle wheelman commanded his vehicle.

  He locked his primary attention on the central limo while also letting his vision widen to encompass the other two. The sun beat at the side of his neck. The crowd jostled with anticipation, the air smelling of Coppertone and deodorant. The Instagram kid whined that he was starving and sagged as though he’d misplaced his spine.